For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.

Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven provided an update on their bundling state/changes for the distribution. In this update he shared that the Clear Linux team at Intel established a goal this year to have "three times more upstream components in the distro. That's a steep growth, and we want to do that with some basic direction and without reducing quality/etc. We have some folks figuring out what things are the most desired that we lack, so we can add those with most priority... but this is where again we more than welcome feedback."

You might think this annual poll would be fairly similar from year to year, from what distros we list to how people answer, but the results are wildly different from year to year.
(At the time of the creation of each poll, we pull the top 15 distributions according to DistroWatch over the past 12 months.)

Last year, the total votes tallied in at 15,574! And the winner was PCLinuxOS with Ubuntu a close second. Another interesting point is that in 2018, there were 950 votes for "other" and 122 comments compared to this year with only 367 votes for "other" and 69 comments.

Fedora operating system releases are (largely) time-based activity where a new base operating system (kernel, libraries, compilers) is built and tested against our Editions for functionality. This provides a new source for solutions to be built on. The base operating systems may continue to be maintained on the current 13 month life cycle — or services that extend that period may be provided in the future. A solution is never obligated to build against all currently maintained bases.

If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there?

Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out. The project contributes to and is powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the project's entire toolkit is open source, ensuring that the maps will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

Drupal is the third most-widely used CMS behind WordPress and Joomla. With an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the world's billion-plus websites, that means Drupal runs tens of millions of sites. Critical flaws in any CMS are popular with hackers, because the vulnerabilities can be unleashed against large numbers of sites with a single, often-easy-to-write script.

Bradley Kuhn works for the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and part of what that organization does is to think about the problems that software freedom may encounter in the future. SFC worries about what will happen with the four freedoms as things change in the world. One of those changes is already upon us: the Internet of Things (IoT) has become quite popular, but it has many dangers, he said. Copyleft can help; his talk is meant to show how.

It is still an open question in his mind whether the IoT is beneficial or not. But the "deep trouble" that we are in from IoT can be mitigated to some extent by copyleft licenses that are "regularly and fairly enforced". Copyleft is not the solution to all of the problems, all of the time—no idea, no matter how great, can be—but it can help with the dangers of IoT. That is what he hoped to convince attendees with his talk.

A joke that he had seen at least three times at the conference (and certainly before that as well) is that the "S" in IoT stands for security. As everyone knows by now, the IoT is not about security. He pointed to some recent incidents, including IoT baby monitors that were compromised by attackers in order to verbally threaten the parents. This is "scary stuff", he said.

Pat decided to update the Python 3 to version 3.7.2. This update from 3.6 to 3.7 broke binary compatibility and a lot of packages needed to be rebuilt in -current. But you all saw the ChangeLog.txt entry of course.

In my ‘ktown’ repository with Plasma5 packages, the same needed to happen. I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages already, so you can safely upgrade to the latest -current as long as you also upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’. Kudos to Pat for giving me advance warning so I could already start recompiling my own stuff before he uploaded his packages.

The KDE Community has just announced the wider integration of Matrix instant messaging into its communications infrastructure. There are instructions on the KDE Community Wiki as well.

So what’s the state of modern chat with KDE-FreeBSD?

The web client works pretty well in Falkon, the default browser in a KDE Plasma session on FreeBSD. I don’t like leaving browsers open for long periods of time, so I looked at the available desktop clients. Porting Quaternion to FreeBSD was dead simple. No compile warnings, nothing, just an hour of doing some boilerplate-ish things, figuring out which Qt components are needed, and doing a bunch of test builds. So that client is now available from official FreeBSD ports. The GTK-based client Fractal was already ported, so there’s choices available for native-desktop applications over the browser or Electron experience.

If you followed Kdenlive’s activity these last years, you know that we dedicated all our energy into a major code refactoring. During this period, which is not the most exciting since our first goal was to simply restore all the stable version’s features, we were extremely lucky to see new people joining the core team, and investing a lot of time in the project.
We are now considering to release the updated version in April, with KDE Applications 19.04. There are still a few rough edges and missing features (with many new ones added as well), but we think it now reached the point where it is possible to start working with it.

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.

The 39 patches touching surprisingly just over three thousand lines of code allow for Linux's KVM to run unmodified Xen HVM images as well as development/testing of Xen guests and Xen para-virtualized drivers. This approach is different from other efforts in the past of tighter Xen+KVM integration.

One of the questions I get asked quite often by people who are just starting or are simply not used to the “new” way things are done in IT is, “What is the cloud?” This, I think, is something you get many different answers to depending on who you ask. I like to think of it this way: The cloud is a grouping of resources (compute, storage, network) that are available to be used in a manner that makes them both highly available and scalable, either up or down, as needed. If I have an issue with a resource, I need to be able to replace that resource quickly — and this is where containers come in. They are lightweight, can be started quickly, and allow us to focus a container on a single job. Containers are also replaceable. If I have a DB container, for instance, there can’t be anything about it that makes it “special” so that when it is replaced, I do not lose operational capability.

As your data needs continue to expand, it’s important to have a storage solution that’s both scalable and easy to manage. That’s particularly true when you’re managing common gateway resources like iSCSI that provide interfaces to storage pools built in Ceph. In this white paper, you’ll see how to use the SUSE Enterprise Storage openATTIC management console to create RADOS block devices (RBDs), pools and iSCSI interfaces for use with Linux, Windows and VMware systems.

The website of the Indian Railways has been a subject of ridicule owing to the various security flaws that have been discovered in its website over the years. When it comes to protecting user data, the website has been lacking in many ways.

The website was previously hacked in 2016 when the details of over 1 crore users were leaked. Last year, Kanishk Sanjani, an ethical hacker had ordered food from the IRCTC website for Rs 7. This vulnerability remained unpatched for well over 7 months even after informing concerned authorities.

he popular windows file archival tool WinRAR has been in use for over two decades now. The software is used to view, create, pack and unpack archives in both ZIP and RAR formats. A recent report by The Register has revealed that the tool has a bug that has remained undetected since 2005.

The popular file archiving tool WinRAR has had a bug for at least 14 years that can be exploited to take over your PC.

The bug can pave the way for archive files that can trigger WinRAR to actually install whatever malware is secretly inside, according to the security firm Check Point, which discovered the software flaw.

"The exploit works by just extracting an archive, and puts over 500 million users at risk," the company said in a detailed report published on Wednesday.

For those interested in distributed 3D rendering, the developers at BMW recently received clearance to open-source RAMSES, a 3D rendering system optimized for bandwidth and resource efficiency.

RAMSES is a distributed rendering engine that's designed for embedded use-cases and thus a heavy emphasis on efficiency, after all it comes out of BMW. RAMSES allows for different processes on different devices connected via a network to provide/consume 3D content and form a unison of cohesive displays.

or Kodi users, it’s always a task to find and install new addons to enjoy live tv, movies, documentaries, and tv shows. To get the Kodi media center up and running, you need to install different Kodi addons which is a time-consuming task. If you want to cut short the amount of time and effort required to install various addons and best Kodi repositories, you must use a Kodi Build.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has redesigned the world’s first web browser WorldWideWeb to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original browser.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee brought the first proposal for a global hypertext system in 1989, which later came to be known as the World Wide Web that he designed on a NeXT machine in 1990. Internet wasn’t as easy to use as it is today. The primitive version of the internet required users to double click on hyperlinks to open them.

Version 18 of D-Bus Broker has been released, the D-Bus message bus implementation designed for high performance and better reliability compared to the D-Bus reference implementation while sticking to compatibility with the original specification.

D-Bus Broker 18 isn't the most exciting release but just has two main changes for improving its compatibility launcher. As of D-Bus Broker 18, configuration parsing errors for this launcher are handled in the same manner as dbus-daemon. Also, the compatibility launcher is no longer isolated in its own network namespace to deal with SELinux API requirements.

Pixelbooks, which run on Chrome OS, are compatible with Linux apps owing to Google’s Crostini software. However, it is still in beta, and there are many limitations if you are running Linux apps. One of the major limitations is that Linux apps on Chrome OS do not support hardware-accelerated graphics and audio.

‘Virtual Desktops’ is a term for being able to manage multiple window configurations across virtual desktops which you are unable to see. Imagine you could move your computer screen to an identical invisible screen next to it, and later switch to it whenever you want. For example, You can have Chrome open in one desktop, text edit in another, and Photoshop in the third and you have the ability to switch between them seamlessly and swiftly without having to juggle between windows open on one desktop. A prime example of Virtual Desktops is Mac OS’s Mission Control feature.

Jason finally discovers the bottomless well of potential that is the Raspberry Pi, and talks about his first experience with Raspbian. Then Joe and Jason take a nostalgic deep dive into retro gaming on both the Raspberry Pi and the Pinebook.

Devespresso Games (The Coma) are working on a new game called Vambrace: Cold Soul, a narrative-driven fantasy adventure that will support Linux.

It's inspired by games like Darkest Dungeon, Castlevania and more it certainly looks good. I've had access to it for a while to do some pre-release Linux testing for the studio and I've been pretty impressed with it. The developer has also been very responsive to feedback and so far the Linux version seems pretty solid.

The inspiration from Darkest Dungeon is pretty clear, with the turn-based battles and graphical style of the characters as well as the atmosphere being all quite familiar. Very much its own game though, the narrative focus of it along with the town exploration is certainly very different.

The LF Deep Learning Foundation (LF DL), a Linux Foundation project that supports and sustains open source innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), announces the Pyro project, started by Uber, as its newest incubation project. Built on top of the PyTorch framework, Pyro is a deep probabilistic programming framework that facilitates large-scale exploration of AI models, making deep learning model development and testing quicker and more seamless. This is the second project LF DL has voted in from Uber, following last December’s Horovod announcement.
Pyro is used by large companies like Siemens, IBM, and Uber, and startups like Noodle.AI, in addition to Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, and The Broad Institute. At Uber, Pyro solves a range of problems including sensor fusion, time series forecasting, ad campaign optimization and data augmentation for deep image understanding.

In this tutorial, we will explore the conversion of Python scripts to Windows executable files in four simple steps. Although there are many ways to do it, we'll be covering, according to popular opinion, the simplest one so far.

This tutorial has been designed after reviewing many common errors that people face while performing this task, and hence contains detailed information to install and set up all the dependencies as well. Feel free to skip any step, if you already have those dependencies installed. Without any further ado, let's start.

Resources are never sufficient to meet growing needs in most industries, and now especially in technology as it carves its way deeper into our lives. Technology makes life easier and more convenient and it is able to evolve and become better over time.

This increased reliance on technology has come at the expense of the computing resources available. As a result, more powerful computers are being developed and the optimization of code has never been more crucial.

Application performance requirements are rising more than our hardware can keep up with. To combat this, people have come up with many strategies to utilize resources more efficiently – Containerizing, Reactive (Asynchronous) Applications, etc.

Yesterday we hosted a webinar with Michael Kennedy from Talk Python To Me podcasts and training presenting Demystifying Python’s async and await Keywords. Turned out to be the highest-rated webinar in 7 years of JetBrains’ webinars. Thanks Michael! The webinar recording is now available, as well as a repository with the Python code he showed and the slides he used.

Sometimes we want to run certain tests only on a specific version of Python.

Suppose you are migrating a large project from Python 2 to Python 3 and you know in advance that certain tests won't run under Python 3.

Chances are that during the migration you are already using the six library. The six libraries have two boolean properties which are initialised to True depending on the Python version which is being used: PY2 when running under Python 2 and PY3 when running under Python 3.

Machines have a trust problem — particularly autonomous machines deployed in safety-critical scenarios, like industrial robots and driverless cars. In a pair of surveys published by the American Automobile Association last January and by Gallup in May, 63 percent of people reported feeling afraid to ride in a fully self-driving vehicle and more than half said they’d never choose to ride in one. Moreover, in a report published by analysts at Pew in 2017, 70 percent of Americans said they were concerned about robots performing tasks currently handled by humans.

In an effort to allay those fears, the Linux Foundation today launched Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA), an open source project comprising tools intended to help companies build and certify Linux-based systems whose failure could result in loss of human life, significant property damage, or environmental damage. In partnership with British chip designer Arm, BMW, autonomous platforms company Kuka, Linutronix, and Toyota, ELISA will work with certification and standardization bodies in “multiple industries” to establish ways Linux can form the foundation of safety-critical systems across industries.

ELISA’s launch follows last year’s rollout of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) 5.0, the newest version of a Linux Foundation project aimed at bringing open source technology to the automotive industry. Previous releases focused mainly on infotainment systems, but 5.0 introduced telematics and mapping solutions that allow OEMs to share mapping data generated by autonomous cars, in addition to offering improved security and a functional safety platform. Toyota and Amazon expressed early support; the former is using AGL in its 2018 Camry.

If you are an avid user of password managers, you might just be in for a surprise. A recent study by researchers at the Independent Security Evaluators found that a number of popular password managers were storing master passwords as plain text within the main memory of devices.

To an expert hacker, this vulnerability is equivalent to getting the keys to multiple accounts as a text document on your computer. The master key of any password manager can be used to gain access to all usernames and passwords being managed by it.

Some kernel developers recently have been trying to work around the massive, horrifying, long-term security holes that have recently been discovered in Intel hardware. In the course of doing so, there were some interesting comments about coding practices.

Christoph Hellwig and Jesper Dangaard Brouer were working on mitigating some of the giant speed sacrifices needed to avoid Intel's gaping security holes. And, Christoph said that one such patch would increase the networking throughput from 7.5 million packets per second to 9.5 million—a 25% speedup.

To do this, the patch would check the kernel's "fast path" for any instances of dma_direct_ops and replace them with a simple direct call.

Linus Torvalds liked the code, but he noticed that Jesper and Christoph's code sometimes would perform certain tests before testing the fast path. But if the kernel actually were taking the fast path, those tests would not be needed. Linus said, "you made the fast case unnecessarily slow."

Thinking about entering the world of programming? What better way to enter than through Java and joining a community of over 10 million developers worldwide? Java is one of the most popular programming languages right now. It is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language which is directly supported by major operating systems like Apple, Linux, Windows, Sun etc. Java is a portable programming language meaning a program can be written on one platform and can run on all platforms. Java supports networking (you can use TCP and UDP sockets) and access remote data using a variety of protocols. It also provides the feature of multithreading, which can utilize multiple processors and one of the prime features of Java is garbage collection. In many languages, the programmer is responsible for deallocating memory and it can become a hassle resulting in errors and segmentation faults. Java, on the other hand, has a garbage collector which manages the memory and frees up the memory by destroying objects not in use.
To start coding in Java you need to have Java installed, the latest version of Java is 11 but Java 8 is still supported so having any one of these installed will be enough to get you started. Writing a program and compiling it would take some effort as you will have to write the code in a text file and then save it in .java and then have to compile it using terminal, or you can use an IDE and save yourself the time and effort used in this process and get a slew of interesting features.

An Integrated Development Environment or IDE for short, is a software application which helps the user to write and compile code easily by providing features like text editing, debugging plugins etc. while providing compilation by the click of one button. Java has many IDEs but two of the most popular ones are NetBeans and Eclipse.

Since being added to Mesa 19.1 at the start of this month, the Panfrost driver has continued speeding along with bringing up this ARM Mali T600/T700/T860 open-source graphics driver support. The latest batch of code was merged overnight, including support for some reverse-engineering helpers.

As some more exciting open-source Intel Linux graphics news this week besides their new merge request to mainline the Iris Gallium3D driver, over in the Vulkan space they have merged today their overlay layer that provides a heads-up display of sorts for their Linux "ANV" driver.

Last month we reported on Intel developing a Vulkan "heads-up display" for their driver to display various statistics to help the driver developers themselves as well as application/game developers. This is akin to Gallium HUD but suited for Vulkan usage rather than OpenGL.

Well that sure didn't take long... Less than 24 hours after the merge request to mainline the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver was sent out, it's now been merged into the mainline code-base! The Intel Gallium3D driver is now in Mesa Git for easy testing of their next-generation OpenGL Linux driver.

Making the day even more exciting for Intel Linux users is this driver's landing comes just minutes after the Vulkan overlay layer HUD was merged for Intel's ANV open-source driver.

The LF Deep Learning Foundation (LF DL), a Linux Foundation that supports and sustains open source innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), announces Ericsson has become the newest Premier Member. Ericsson, a global leader in delivering ICT solutions, has been at the forefront of communications technology for 140 years.

Ericsson has already begun contributing to the LF Deep Learning Foundation through the Acumos project, working with partners like AT&T, Orange and the broader community to solve complex problems surrounding 5G and IoT through AI and ML.

In addition to participating in LF DL, Ericsson is also a member of LF Networking, DPDK, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and LF Edge Foundation. Ericsson is strongly committed to these future-forward technologies, and to that end the company has built a Global AI Accelerator focused on tackling the complex business problems of today and tomorrow.

Calico, which is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, can be used on many clouds. It supports such common cloud APIs as Container Network Interface (CNI), OpenStack Neutron, and libnetwork. Besides Kubernetes, it can also be used with Docker, Mesos, and Rkt. You can natively deploy Calico on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine, and the IBM Cloud. You can’t use Calico directly on Azure, but you can use Calico policies with the right network setup.

You can get started with Calico today. If you need help and support to get Calico into production, Tigera, Calico’s corporate backer, offers service level agreements (SLAs).

OnionShare 2 has been released after nearly a year of work, adding support for anonymous dropboxes, next generation V3 onion services, and more.

OnionShare is an open source GUI tool to securely and anonymously send and receive files of any size using the Tor onion services. It's available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

The application starts a web server on your computer, for which it assigns an unguessable Tor web address which can be used by others to download files from your computer, or upload files to your computer (with OnionShare 2), using end-to-end encryption. This is done without signing up for an account or using a third-party file-sharing service (the files are hosted on your computer).

Henri Sivonen solved on January 12, a 15 years old bug! When parsing an HTML document (string), the browser creates a DOM tree with nodes nested into each others. As you can imagine, all browsers have a limit on the depth of the tree to avoid bad memory overflows and crashes. On webcompat.com, we got some reports that some sites were missing content compared to Chrome for example. These sites were reaching the nesting limits of Firefox. The limit has been increased.

Jingle Smash is a WebVR game where you shoot ornaments at blocks to knock them over. It has multiple levels, each which is custom designed with blocks to form the puzzle. Since you play in a first person perspective 3D, the levels must carefully designed for this unique view point. To make the design proess easier I created a simple in-game 3D editor.

While Jingle Smash is similar in concept to Angry Birds there is a big difference. The player sees the level head on from a 3D perspective instead of a side view. This means the player can’t see the whole level at once, requiring completely custom designed levels. Rovio is facing this challenge as well with their upcoming VR version of Angry Birds. The difficult part of editing a 3D game on a desktop is that you don’t really experience the levels the same way they will actually be played.

At first I went back and forth from 2D view to my VR headset every time I made a change to a level, even just sliding a few blocks around. As you can imagine this grew very tedious. The ideal tool would let me move objects around in the same mode where I play with them. I needed an in-game editor. So that’s what I built, and I created a minimal UI toolkit in the process.

We’ve added a new page ahead of the Firefox 66 release. Check in Pontoon and look for firefox/whatsnew_66.lang. To be part of the release, make sure to complete it by March 6. The demo URL is not ready at the moment. We will update you as soon as it becomes available.

A small but an important update is in the privacy/index.lang file. The change is urgent so please localize the string as soon as possible.

Have you taken a look of the newly designed navigation bar? It was recently rolled out with quite a bit of content to localize. Make it a high priority if it is not localized yet.

This is a welcome addition since Apple is not making interfacing with its system components from C++ particularly easy. This requires code written in Objective-C, one of Apple’s favorite programming languages, to interface with the built-in Cocoa libraries, as well as the necessary glue code written in C++ to make the touchbar appear as a perfectly ordinary Qt widget to Qt applications.

In the previous article we have finished creating the player boundary detection mechanism and in this article, we will create a simple enemy player overlapping detection mechanism which we will then further modify it in the next article. Before we start, below are the game plans.

More in Tux Machines

today's leftovers

For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times.
Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven provided an update on their bundling state/changes for the distribution. In this update he shared that the Clear Linux team at Intel established a goal this year to have "three times more upstream components in the distro. That's a steep growth, and we want to do that with some basic direction and without reducing quality/etc. We have some folks figuring out what things are the most desired that we lack, so we can add those with most priority... but this is where again we more than welcome feedback."

You might think this annual poll would be fairly similar from year to year, from what distros we list to how people answer, but the results are wildly different from year to year.
(At the time of the creation of each poll, we pull the top 15 distributions according to DistroWatch over the past 12 months.)
Last year, the total votes tallied in at 15,574! And the winner was PCLinuxOS with Ubuntu a close second. Another interesting point is that in 2018, there were 950 votes for "other" and 122 comments compared to this year with only 367 votes for "other" and 69 comments.

Fedora operating system releases are (largely) time-based activity where a new base operating system (kernel, libraries, compilers) is built and tested against our Editions for functionality. This provides a new source for solutions to be built on. The base operating systems may continue to be maintained on the current 13 month life cycle — or services that extend that period may be provided in the future. A solution is never obligated to build against all currently maintained bases.

If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there?
Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out. The project contributes to and is powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the project's entire toolkit is open source, ensuring that the maps will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

Drupal is the third most-widely used CMS behind WordPress and Joomla. With an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the world's billion-plus websites, that means Drupal runs tens of millions of sites. Critical flaws in any CMS are popular with hackers, because the vulnerabilities can be unleashed against large numbers of sites with a single, often-easy-to-write script.

Bradley Kuhn works for the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and part of what that organization does is to think about the problems that software freedom may encounter in the future. SFC worries about what will happen with the four freedoms as things change in the world. One of those changes is already upon us: the Internet of Things (IoT) has become quite popular, but it has many dangers, he said. Copyleft can help; his talk is meant to show how.
It is still an open question in his mind whether the IoT is beneficial or not. But the "deep trouble" that we are in from IoT can be mitigated to some extent by copyleft licenses that are "regularly and fairly enforced". Copyleft is not the solution to all of the problems, all of the time—no idea, no matter how great, can be—but it can help with the dangers of IoT. That is what he hoped to convince attendees with his talk.
A joke that he had seen at least three times at the conference (and certainly before that as well) is that the "S" in IoT stands for security. As everyone knows by now, the IoT is not about security. He pointed to some recent incidents, including IoT baby monitors that were compromised by attackers in order to verbally threaten the parents. This is "scary stuff", he said.

Pat decided to update the Python 3 to version 3.7.2. This update from 3.6 to 3.7 broke binary compatibility and a lot of packages needed to be rebuilt in -current. But you all saw the ChangeLog.txt entry of course.
In my ‘ktown’ repository with Plasma5 packages, the same needed to happen. I have uploaded a set of recompiled packages already, so you can safely upgrade to the latest -current as long as you also upgrade to the latest ‘ktown’. Kudos to Pat for giving me advance warning so I could already start recompiling my own stuff before he uploaded his packages.

The KDE Community has just announced the wider integration of Matrix instant messaging into its communications infrastructure. There are instructions on the KDE Community Wiki as well.
So what’s the state of modern chat with KDE-FreeBSD?
The web client works pretty well in Falkon, the default browser in a KDE Plasma session on FreeBSD. I don’t like leaving browsers open for long periods of time, so I looked at the available desktop clients. Porting Quaternion to FreeBSD was dead simple. No compile warnings, nothing, just an hour of doing some boilerplate-ish things, figuring out which Qt components are needed, and doing a bunch of test builds. So that client is now available from official FreeBSD ports. The GTK-based client Fractal was already ported, so there’s choices available for native-desktop applications over the browser or Electron experience.

If you followed Kdenlive’s activity these last years, you know that we dedicated all our energy into a major code refactoring. During this period, which is not the most exciting since our first goal was to simply restore all the stable version’s features, we were extremely lucky to see new people joining the core team, and investing a lot of time in the project.
We are now considering to release the updated version in April, with KDE Applications 19.04. There are still a few rough edges and missing features (with many new ones added as well), but we think it now reached the point where it is possible to start working with it.

Preliminary Support Allows Linux KVM To Boot Xen HVM Guests

As one of the most interesting patch series sent over by an Oracle developer in quite a while at least on the virtualization front, a "request for comments" series was sent out on Wednesday that would enable the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to be able to boot Xen HVM guests.
The 39 patches touching surprisingly just over three thousand lines of code allow for Linux's KVM to run unmodified Xen HVM images as well as development/testing of Xen guests and Xen para-virtualized drivers. This approach is different from other efforts in the past of tighter Xen+KVM integration.

Servers: Kubernetes, SUSE Enterprise Storage and Microsoft/SAP

One of the questions I get asked quite often by people who are just starting or are simply not used to the “new” way things are done in IT is, “What is the cloud?” This, I think, is something you get many different answers to depending on who you ask. I like to think of it this way: The cloud is a grouping of resources (compute, storage, network) that are available to be used in a manner that makes them both highly available and scalable, either up or down, as needed. If I have an issue with a resource, I need to be able to replace that resource quickly — and this is where containers come in. They are lightweight, can be started quickly, and allow us to focus a container on a single job. Containers are also replaceable. If I have a DB container, for instance, there can’t be anything about it that makes it “special” so that when it is replaced, I do not lose operational capability.

As your data needs continue to expand, it’s important to have a storage solution that’s both scalable and easy to manage. That’s particularly true when you’re managing common gateway resources like iSCSI that provide interfaces to storage pools built in Ceph. In this white paper, you’ll see how to use the SUSE Enterprise Storage openATTIC management console to create RADOS block devices (RBDs), pools and iSCSI interfaces for use with Linux, Windows and VMware systems.